Creating Communities amid Crisis: Racial Capitalism, School Gentrification, and Resistance in Seattle

• In Event: Advancing New Directions in School Gentrification Research Centered on Righting, Remedy, and Repair

Abstract

U.S. Metropolitan racial demographics are shifting. Racialized processes have brought more White people to urban areas, while suburbs have become more racially diverse, changing the racial composition of schools. Within, outside, in spite, and because of these processes, people “make place.” Place-making is a political process in which people create places and their attached meanings amid an uneven terrain of power (Manzo & Desanto, 2021), of which schools are significant factors (Lipman, 2011). This place-making occurs under racial capitalism, or a political economy organized around and productive of racial difference (Robinson, 1983). Using Seattle as a case of school gentrification in a multiracial city, I investigate how people’s everyday actions have shaped school-communities, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods with majority people of color.

While education scholarship has paid much attention to issues of spatial equity like racial segregation, less attention has been paid to the ways gentrification and housing affordability impact schools and possibilities for racial equity (Pearman, 2020). This study relies on conceptualizations of racial capitalism and critical spatial analysis to contextualize gentrification in longer histories of spatial injustice (Pulido, 2017; Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022; McKittrick & Woods, 2007; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). I conceptualize how power flows between macro-policy contexts and micro-everyday activities and back again in a dialectical, racialized process (Anyon, 2014; Gilmore, 2022; Harvey, 2003; Soja, 2010). This study examines these everyday actions by people connected to schools to understand how they respond to changing demographics. For this smaller study within a larger research project on the nexus of residential zoning and schools, I observed public focus groups and planning meetings and interviewed members of school-communities (parents, alumni, teachers, and school leaders).

Findings reveal placemaking strategies utilized by families and those by school staff to create a sense of belonging in gentrifying neighborhood schools. I find families rely on histories of experiencing racism to create a sense of belonging in the present, pursue home ownership, opt in or out of public school, and create parent networks. Then, I explore three key placemaking strategies of school staff. I find teachers and school leaders disrupt official enrollment rules to keep students of color enrolled, make curricular choices that give students a sense of place, and organize for more just housing policy. These practices tend to be informal in that they are not institutionalized or supported by a larger organization. However, attention to these informal practices demonstrate the potential for future organizing within and across school-communities for more just neighborhoods.

These findings add to educational research by looking specifically at people’s placemaking in a gentrifying city and placemaking in school-communities. Typically, research has examined one of these sites, but not both. This study is also meant to counter the narrative of powerless people facing the specter of gentrification and displacement. These findings highlight the ways these exploitative systems can be undone, and how schools can be integral to this work.

Author

• Hailey Karcher, Seattle Public Schools